Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTA significant proportion of the population in Latin America depends on the informal economy and lacks adequate protection against a variety of economic risks. This article suggests that economic vulnerability affects the way individuals relate to political parties. Given the truncated structure of welfare states in the region, citizens in the informal sector receive lower levels of social security benefits and face higher economic uncertainty. This vulnerability makes it difficult for voters to establish strong programmatic linkages with political parties because partisan platforms and policies do not necessarily represent their interests and needs. Using cross-national microlevel data, this study shows that individuals living in informality are skeptical about state social policy efforts and exhibit weaker partisan attachments. The findings suggest that effective political representation of disadvantaged groups remains a challenge in Latin American democracies.

Este artículo explora los vínculos entre la agenda de política social y los objetivos de igualdad de género durante la administración de Enrique Peña Nieto. En particular, me enfoco en la evolución de tres políticas con implicaciones para el bienestar de las mujeres: los servicios de cuidado infantil, el Seguro de Vida para Jefas de Familia y la Pensión para Adultos Mayores. El balance sugiere que, si bien estos esfuerzos favorecieron la atención a mujeres en situación económicamente vulnerable, el énfasis en el combate a la pobreza prevaleció sobre un enfoque basado en derechos sociales. Por tanto, objetivos tales como la equidad de género en la protección social o la socialización de los cuidados y la educación temprana quedaron como asignaturas pendientes. La provisión de estos programas consistió principalmente en transferencias y reprodujo el esquema de fragmentación de las políticas sociales, lo que resultó en bajos niveles de institucionalidad.

México se caracteriza por la desigualdad de oportunidades y la escasa movilidad social. Las personas enfrentan severos obstáculos para alcanzar mayores niveles de bienestar debido a rezagos persistentes y a nuevos desafíos para la justicia social. Este volumen parte de un estudio de los legados de desigualdad en la educación para luego explorar los patrones diferenciados de oportunidades que se tienen para adquirir trabajos e ingresos dignos. A estas asimetrías se suman dos fenómenos relativamente nuevos que han profundizado las brechas sociales existentes y que representan agendas de investigación imprescindibles: la migración de retorno y el cambio climático. El libro concluye con el análisis de las percepciones ciudadanas sobre las desigualdades y con el de la heterogeneidad de las capacidades gubernamentales disponibles en el plano subnacional para abatir estas asimetrías sociales.

In Latin America, deep social inequalities coexist with persistent, high-level criminal violence. Facing competing needs and budget constraints, citizens in the region have to prioritize among different policy choices. We analyze how perceptions of insecurity and crime victimization shape attitudes toward budgetary priorities in social and security policies. Our analysis relies on original data from Mexico and Brazil, two countries exhibiting increased violence at the national level, albeit with important regional variation. We find that exposure to crime takes its toll on citizens' policy priorities. In both Mexico and Brazil, citizens who feel insecure seem to prioritize public expenditure on the police over social investment policies. Victims of criminal violence are, however, mostly indifferent as to budgetary allocations across the security and social policy fields, suggesting that their spending priorities might diverge from these two spheres of government action or give rise to policy indifference.

Criminal violence is one of the most pressing problems in Latin America and the Caribbean, with profound political consequences. Its effects on social policy preferences, however, remain largely unexplored. This article argues that to understand such effects it is crucial to analyze victimization experiences and perceptions of insecurity as separate phenomena with distinct attitudinal consequences. Heightened perceptions of insecurity are associated with a reduced demand for public welfare provision, as such perceptions reflect a sense of the state's failure to provide public security. At the same time, acknowledging the mounting costs and needs that direct experience with crime entails, victimization is expected to increase support for social policies, particularly for health services. Survey data from twenty-four Latin American and Caribbean countries for the period 2008–12 show that perceptions of insecurity indeed reduce support for the state's role in welfare provision, whereas crime victimization strongly increases such preferences.